The current gatekeepers of the web and computing industry include publications such as TechCrunch and TechMeme.

I barely ever read these, and here's why. They only tell me things about the big boys, mostly when money is involved. It hardly matters to me who VCs are investing in, what advertising strategy Facebook is pursuing, or the fact yet another social network for cats has been launched.

That's not what I'm in technology for: I want to hear about genuine advance, discovery, code I can read, services I can use, new applications of research. And I want to share with and learn from others in the same ecosphere.

Over the last 24 hours, hordes of Twitter-refugees have been signing up with the microblogging service Identi.ca. Fed up with the restricted and unpredictable service from Twitter, over the last week or two people have been jumping this way and that: Pownce, Plurk, FriendFeed, and now Identi.ca. Here's my Identi.ca stream.

Let's get something straight up-front. Identi.ca's in its early stages. At version 0.4.1 it's not yet added all the features that Twitter has now broken.

A lot of people are jumping on Identi.ca and going away again, muttering "it's not got X, I'm off back to Twitter." True, but it's not as a Twitter-replacement today that Identi.ca is important.

Here's why I think Identi.ca counts for more than just being a Twitter clone.

It's open source

We've switched on personal schedule sharing on the OSCON web site.

When you've put together your desired schedule by starring sessions of interest, just hand out the "public view" link to let others know what you want to see.

Here's my personal schedule. In it you'll find all the plenary sessions (as co-chair I simply cannot miss these, and neither should you, however late the party!)

Also there's a fair smattering of my pet topics such as open web technologies, virtualization and dynamic languages, and a bunch of things I want to hear more about: Prophet, female participation in open source, Clutter, and of course Erlang.

I'm fascinated to find out what other people have got planned, so please publish your schedules too and let's compare notes.

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The Administrator account is created as part of the Samba LDAP initialization process.

I'm rapidly coming round to your point of view on FF. It needs careful pruning to ensure it doesn't descend into dross

Sorry, that's just not helpful. Take a look at what I wrote, what it means. Identi.ca's slow right now because a one-man company is funding and scaling EC2 instances from his own pocket, and going without sleep to do it since a bunch of Twitter-refugees jumped on the site over the last 24 hours.